Trying to Read Washington

It will come as no surprise that Joan Didion found the perfect, casual words for the heavy psychic undertow of catastrophe before the rest of us needed them. But the fluid blend of menace and ambiguity in the first line of “The Last Thing He Wanted,” a 1997 novel, has an almost perverse simplicity:

“Some real things have happened lately.”

Sitting on a plush, reddish sofa at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, 10 days after the attacks that convulsed the city she calls home these days, Didion bears the aura of haunted witness one finds in talking to New Yorkers recently. She keeps very still when her words are quoted back to her. With grim emphasis, her voice barely audible, she agrees: “Yeah, some real things sure have happened.”

Didion haltingly says she has “not begun to process” the events of Sept. 11. The terror that defines so many of her characters cannot be filtered through writing. She’d spent the morning working on a new book--”it’s still amorphous”--about her native California. She’d gone to the kitchen, and her brother-in-law called with the first news. She “just drifted” through the rest of that day, “watching without really registering” the televised repetitions of destruction.

At first, she wasn’t going to leave New York to do this book tour for her new collection of eight essays about media and politics, “Political Fictions.” She worried that “it was not a good time to go away from home, that people would not be in the mood to talk about a book.” She called her editor at Knopf, who argued that the context of these events might give this book a new set of connections. He was right. Reading “Political Fictions,” it seems as if the book has become the one she intended to write and one she could never have planned. The one she wrote consists of reportorial pieces, closer to media criticism than anything. They start with the election of one Bush and finish with that of the Bush who comes on the screen of the hotel TV during our conversation, talking about a new “war” for which he sees no end.

Looking to the past, Didion’s book chronicles presidential campaigns, an impeachment, intrigues and upheavals. But a detail, a quote, an observation will shove the narrative to that second level of awareness, the one disaster has written.

A passage about links between various Washington types and Ken Starr contains a line about “Theodore Olson, whose wife, Barbara Olson, was a member of . . . .”

Whatever she was a member of then, Oslon will always belong to the lists of the dead from the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Didion had woven her carefully into her portrait of the “permanent political class” that she says includes, reporters, media stars, politicians. But the name is like a hole that history has made.

Elsewhere, Didion describes a man named Marvin Olasky, an advocate of Christian conservatism. He pressed opinions on George Bush, she writes, which “inadvertently opened a view of women not far from that of the Taliban.”

There’s the page where a Democratic pollster reports that Americans put such a low premium on foreign policy they “favor furthering our economic interests over support for democracy by a two to one margin.” Indifference to foreign policy? What would that poll show now?

She tracks the self-interested agendas of Americans abroad. Aides to the older George Bush, during his 1988 campaign, had Jordanian troops change the color of their uniforms and raise an American flag over an Arab landscape to neutralize the context for viewers back home. Campaign aides thought the setting should look anything but Arab. They told reporters that “there was nothing to be gained from showing him schmoozing with Arabs.”

“That scene has a big resonance to me now that it didn’t have before,” Didion says.

“It was an illustration of how our face to the world gets wrapped up and kind of spoiled by our domestic needs, our domestic politics. He was on a trip abroad and he was making a campaign video. He didn’t really see the other place at all, but just what he wanted from it.”

She fears “that is not about to change.”

Didion sees a Washington that is communicated to us by a “small, but highly visible group of people who, day by day and through administration after administration, relay Washington to the world, tell its story, agree among themselves upon and then disseminate its narrative.” She doesn’t believe that is likely to change either.

This, really, is the subject of “Political Fictions,” how government does and does not connect with those it governs. The conduits are often familiar--Jeff Greenfield, Cokie Roberts, David Broder, Sam Donaldson, Bob Woodward. Others are best known to media junkies. They shape the inner life of the body politic. As Didion writes, “They report the stories. They write the op-ed pieces. They appear on the talk shows. They consult, they advise, they swap jobs, they travel with unmarked passports between the public and the private, the West Wing and the green room.”

Gathering flint chips of quotation, she shows how the boundaries between reporters, ideologues, commentators blur. In one piece, Didion describes how, outraged that Americans could discern the difference between Bill Clinton’s powers as an effective president and his failings as a man, they tried to shape the story of his impeachment. But that is just one example of how the opinion-shapers display a “readiness to abandon those not inside the process.” The result, she writes, is an electorate with a “shallowed ... tolerance of participatory democracy,” deprived of information that might give it a fuller idea of what to want from its leaders.

This, Didion says, is the media process wrapping itself around events that started Sept. 11. She calls her book “a polemic” and says she hopes it will encourage readers to “pay attention ... wake up ... “ and look beyond the surfaces of information.

I interview her the afternoon after Bush the younger gives his speech declaring “war” on world terrorism. “It was kind of reviewed as a kind of campaign speech,” she says.

“Judy Woodruff was talking to a couple of Democratic consultants, and they said he’d done well. They said he said what he needed to say. But nobody really addressed the content of it,” she says.

We turn on CNN. Didion, 66, is a small, slight woman often compared to a bird. The TV is perched high in a cabinet and she peers up at Lou Dobbs speaking about the climb in defense stocks like cat watching a bird just slightly out of its reach, more curious at the moment than hungry. She presses the remote, moving up and down the channels. A replay of the president’s speech comes on. Didion changes the channel. The commentator on MSNBC declares that the president “is not a great orator. We know that. But I think he gave it the note of FDR after Pearl Harbor.”

Didion, with a slight wince, turns off the machine. “Well, it sounds very positive on all sides.” She pauses, one of many moments when she seems to converse with her very restrained mind. She says she is “temperamentally incapable” of drawing quick conclusions from what she sees. She lifts her head. “The only person who has addressed the thing, which he has done by not addressing the geopolitical thing, was [New York Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani. He had an authentic response to a new situation.” It is as close to a compliment as one can imagine her giving to someone in the public arena she describes.

She says she feels that the media talkers are slowly forming a story they want the country to follow. What that is, she’s not yet sure. She’s impressively open about saying how much of what is going on she finds “vague” and “not quite clear.” Not knowing does not seem to cause her much anxiety. She is a long sufferer of vagueness. Staying attentive amid beguiling complexities has marked her career as novelist, reporter-essayist and screenwriter.

Such a person can become fascinating merely by sharing what she watches. Much as we speak about the intrigues of commentary in the late 1980s and 1990s, the events of the past two weeks keep returning: the attacks, sensation of watching the World Trade Center come down. The conversation takes a peculiar turn. “You know, there is a television program that is on on Saturday morning, and all they do are demos, great demos,” Didion says. It takes a moment to realize she means demolitions. “There are five or six companies that do nothing but implode buildings,” she adds. “I love it.

“I only came across it a couple of months ago. I watch it if I happen to not be doing anything. It is in the morning, and the point is that the buildings, when they show on the demo program, they show the setup, show the whole prep for it. The team from the company comes in. You think how incredibly complex it is, how much skill is required to make a building fall straight down.”

Surely, I say, all the demolition shows in the world could not have prepared her for the sight of those buildings coming down. “No,” she assures me. “That was a shock. I don’t think anybody will ever forget the sight of those buildings coming down. No, no. That was a shock.”

Still, she seems just half-capable of convincing herself that the Saturdays of watching the safely engineered demolitions will never be the same. The detached appreciation for buildings collapsing has given way to a completely different kind of devastation. Some real things have happened.